Missouri redistricting chaos returns to US Supreme Court
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — A fast-moving legal battle over Missouri’s effort to eke an additional Republican seat out of its congressional map for this year’s midterm election returned to the US Supreme Court on Wednesday, a day after Justice Brett Kavanaugh had effectively rejected the same proposed map.
A group that organized opposition to the GOP-friendly congressional map filed an emergency appeal, urging the Supreme Court to step in once again and block the map from being used in this year’s midterm elections. The quick-turn appeal followed a dizzying 24 hours in the case that saw action from four different courts.
The group, People Not Politicians, warned that a federal court order backing the GOP map would cause “confusion and disruption” and subject “election officials to irreconcilable judicial commands on the eve of an election, with a federal court inserting itself to wreak havoc on the state’s elections.”
Back-to-back conflicting court orders on Tuesday night left uncertain whether the Show Me State would likely send six or seven Republicans to the House next year. This comes as the GOP, at President Donald Trump’s behest, has engaged in an unusual mid-decade redistricting effort to retain its narrow grip on the chamber.
The latest round of legal maneuvering began late last week when the Missouri Supreme Court blocked the GOP map for the November midterm election, ruling that the state couldn’t use those new districts until voters had a chance to pass judgment on them in a referendum. Missouri officials raced up to the US Supreme Court, but Kavanaugh denied the state’s request for review in a perfunctory, one-line order Tuesday evening.
But minutes after Kavanaugh’s decision, US District Judge Stephen Clark handed down a separate temporary order in a different case that would essentially require the state to proceed under the map created last year that targets a Democratic district based in Kansas City. A federal appeals court in St. Louis declined to pause that decision, so People Not Politicians returned to the US Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The court requested that Missouri respond by Thursday morning, an especially fast turnaround.
Missouri’s new map, which was enacted last year, was used in the state’s primary election in August. But the state’s highest court ruled last week that officials in Missouri wrongly dismissed a petition with more than 300,000 signatures to let the state’s voters decide on the map via a referendum before it took effect.
The map targeted the 5th Congressional District, held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, by breaking up its Kansas City base and stretching it into rural and Republican-leaning parts of the state.
Opponents of the map had submitted their petition for a referendum late last year, but state officials waited until August 4, the last possible date, which happened to be the day of the state’s primary, to declare that the state constitution’s right for voters to weigh in on legislation doesn’t apply to redistricting measures. The state supreme court rejected that interpretation.
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